The old man was nice. He would sit on the park bench petting the cat that always sat with him. I saw them every day when my Mom took me to the park after kindergarten. She even let me accept treats from him once she spoke to him for a while. He always had the best candy. He even spoke to me like I wasn’t just a silly little kid.

The other kids used to pick on me. They said I was different. They made fun of the questions I always asked. The old man would just smile and answer my questions without comments. He also didn’t remark on the fact that I kept confusing left and right. He would just smile and point at what he was indicating.

The last day I saw him, the old man gave me a marble. I had never seen one like it before. The colors in it swirled and shifted as if it were not really a solid. There were threads of metallic material that moved around in the shifting colors, like seaweed in water. I remember that imagery because I had watched a show with my parents that talked about seaweed.

He looked at me with green eyes that shone with laughter. His silver, shoulder length hair blew in the wind as he put the marble in my hand. “Keep this safe. If it is lost, hold the image of it in your mind. As long as you can see it in your mind, it will never be truly lost,” he said.

I was confused by what he said, and while I was thinking about it, he stood and walked away. We waved goodbye to each other. He never came back to that park again. My mom told me later, “He probably moved to live somewhere closer to family.”

That night, he came into my dreams. “Hey Kai! Don’t tell anyone, but seeing me here means you are special. I have some really important things to teach you,” he confided with a kind smile. His cat, I remember that his name was Temple, was perched on his shoulder. Temple looked intently at me and then slowly blinked his eyes in a deliberate manner.

“Why me, sir?” I asked.

“That part is simple. You know how you complained that the other kids called you different? It’s because you ARE different. It’s called being neurodivergent. Your brain works in ways that confuse them. I want to help you learn to use those differences to your advantage.”

“What is neurodivergent?” He had me confused. I knew that I had trouble reading the books I was supposed to be able to understand. The order of the letters was confusing. Adults, other than my parents were always telling me that my letters kept pointing the wrong way when I practiced. I also knew that I hated flashing lights and loud noises, but I loved complicated patterns. Even better was music with complicated beats and notes.

“The problem you have with letters and words will be talked about by teachers and people who don’t understand. They will use words like ‘learning disability’ and ‘dyslexia’. What is really giving you trouble is that your mind wants more information to understand the direction things go. Let’s call that information a vector.”

I could feel my face scrunching as I puzzled about the new words. “I never heard of dis-whatsis. Is that even a real word? I know a Victor. We call him Vic at school.”

The old man chuckled gently and patted my head. “Vector is not a person. It means ‘the direction a thing moves’. In a sentence, the vector is the way you read a word, starting at the beginning and finishing when it ends.”

I looked at him again after looking at the cat. I like cats. “How do I know the vector?”

“You are smart. That is the right question! What can help you figure out the vector is another thing that is called a tangent. It is an imaginary point that you find. That point, combined with other tangents, tells you the vector. Think of it like a tack your teacher puts in the bulletin board. If they put three more tacks in the board and use a bit of string to connect the tacks, the string is like the vector. If you put the first tack at the capital letter at the start of a sentence, and the last tack at the period or other punctuation mark, following the string from the first tack to the last one shows you the vector.”

My eyes opened wide as the ideas began to course through my mind. Why didn’t my teacher put it that way? She was nice, but she kept telling me I had to learn my right from my left before she could explain it. “Wow, you’re smart, Mister!”

“My name is Sansin, Kai. We are going to be learning so much together. Please call me Sensei Sansin.”

He taught me at least three nights a week for many years after that dream. He always taught me in my dreams. The marble he had given me was gone that first morning when I woke up. He was right when he told me that I could look at it in the quiet of my mind. It helped me when the chaos of the world scared me, and I could not stop the rocking. Eventually, focusing on that object in my mind made the repetitive movements not needed. When my mind craved the intense flow of information, the object in my mind helped me to organize the chaos and see the beautiful patterns in the seemingly randomness. I was able to expand what my mind to take in so much more information at once.

I still loved trains…